


do you ever wonder if the stars shine out for you?

by eyesonfire



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Drabble, Freeform, M/M, Ouch, Unrequited
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-09
Updated: 2013-02-09
Packaged: 2017-11-28 16:58:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/676740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eyesonfire/pseuds/eyesonfire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>they grow wiser, and the seasons roll back and the autumn leaves float down. liam doesn't know, but liam doesn't know a lot, and zayn doesn't know anything much except that he loves liam.</p>
            </blockquote>





	do you ever wonder if the stars shine out for you?

**Author's Note:**

> ed sheeran "autumn leaves"

zayn thinks liam is kind of like a sunday drive, windows down and the sun melting in, hands out the window and feet on the dashboard. 

 

kind of like a a sunset, painting the sky gold and red and orange around him, changing the whole fucking world just by existing.

 

kind of like autumn, inevitable and always and splashing vivid, shocking colour onto the dull grey of the london streets of zayn’s life.

 

kind of like life itself, constant and steady, another day, another life. and yeah, liam is pretty much zayn's life, a consuming hunger that fills him and holds him and eats him up inside. it fills him so much the only way it escapes is through the salty tears that float down his face and touch his nose with silky fingers.

 

another tear, another cry, it's not complicated.

 

and really, it's not. liam lives and zayn loves him from afar. 

 

zayn feels as though he lives on a star; so far away, condemned to look and see but never touch. its an unspoken rule he never lets himself break; self inflicted shackles. he locked his hands behind his own back, bound them tight in secrecy and friendship and gave louis the key to throw it away. 

 

zayn loves liam and tomorrow is always a day away.

 

he touches, sometimes, a friendly pat or a hug or a hand on his arm and his heart is too big for his chest and he can feel his pulse thrumming hummingbird fast in his fingertips, but its friendly and its all it will ever be and his heartbeat hurts his touching.

 

but he gets this. he gets his soul mate, he gets to live his life next to him, even if not with him, and he gets to see him happy. because all he wants is for liam to be happy, and if that means giving him up to danielle or being his friend and never asking for more, then he'll do it. he'd do anything for liam.

 

it's not complicated. it's maybe the least complicated thing in the universe. it's a fact, a truth, a peice of himself that he couldn’t doubt or touch or change if he even wanted to. it's everything that he is, it's the stars in the sky and the wings of a seven four seven, it's the ink on his skin and everything that was ever something in the world.

 

zayn loves liam.

 

sometimes he thinks the very feeling might crush him from the inside out, when it’s too big and too much to contain and it’s like he can’t breathe and a few ribs are slowly cracking from the pressure of it.

 

but his ribs never break and his heart never explodes and somehow he contains it all inside of him. it leaks, it melts out of him in salty streams and fresh black ink and sweat and yet it only grows.

 

zayn loves liam and the stars burn bright.

 

they fly, new people and new faces, another place for them to die. they grow older, new faces and new hair but same hearts and same lies.

 

they feel colder, grow closer into strangers.

 

zayn waits, and keeps half hoping and his star still floats too far away from liam's earth to touch down.

 

they grow wiser, and the seasons roll back and the autumn leaves float down. liam doesn't know, but liam doesn’t know a lot, and zayn doesn't know anything much except that he loves liam.

 

zayn loves liam and the sky is blue.

 

there's danielle, and the ones after her, and each one is the love of liam's life and the light in his eyes and the woman he is going to marry because that's just liam. he throws his whole into everything, loves so hard and so much and so completely and zayn sometimes wants it so bad that his fingers tremble and his voice wavers when he sings love songs to a hundred thousand screaming people that aren't liam.

 

but his voice plays a symphony of friendly niceties about each girl, an orchestra for liam to hum to as he walks out the door and into her arms. he hugs her, and feels the warmth of her body and tries not to think about liam holding her, and touching her, kissing her and fucking into her with murmurs of love and adoration and he kisses her cheek and tries to feel the warmth liam's lips left behind.

 

zayn loves liam and the leaves turn orange.

 

he wonders, in the dark shelter of night, a warm, safe blanket around his shaking shoulders, if he missed his chance. if he missed the nudge fate gave him, missed the moment when liam's "i'm sorry"would have been a yes. if when, back at the start, they were puppy piled on each other at the bungalow, the five of them high on excitement, drunk on adrendine, he should have asked and liam would have said yes. 

 

if when louis and harry had a sort-of thing and he and liam had a sort-of thing and niall just cuddled everyone, if he should have spoken out, breached the chasm of sort-of and dived into a real thing, like louis and harry had. but louis had always been braver than zayn, and he never did.

 

he didn't say anything then, and he won't say anything now. even as the words sit heavy on his tongue, even as they roll in his stomach and mix sickly with his misery like vodka sliding against gin.

 

he pastes on a smile and inks on another tattoo and smokes another fag, because he loves the way liam tells him off.

 

zayn loves liam and the birds sing.

 

they think he sleeps around, and he lets them. because he doesn't think he could handle liam's pity, his worry if he knew he sits at bars until late and stares at the answers to his problems that he can never quite find at the bottom of his glass.

 

but louis knows, louis' always been the one he's gone to, drunk and sobbing and it's all too much to bear. and harry knows, only because harry knows everything that louis does. and zayn thinks niall knows, just because feelings are niall's thing.

 

but niall never makes zayn suffer the indignity of letting him know he knows, the shame of everyone knowing and everyone pitying.

 

zayn loves liam and another day passes by.

 

sometimes zayn thinks his love is a tidal wave, a huge swell of emotion that rides up in him and catches him off gaurd each and everytime he looks at liam and thinks 'wow, i really love you.'

 

thinks when he looks at liam, as he knows he does, that the whole world could be rolled up and encopassed in his gaze because it feels that huge, that big, that much feeling.

 

thinks that if he was an artist, he would dip his paintbrush in all the colours of the universe, the golden brown and burnt orange and deep, liquid chocolate of his hair, the bulgarian rose and mahogany and warm, dark gold of his eyes, the porcelain angles of his face and the sizzling red lines of his body and he would trace the brush gently across a canvas and pretend he was trailing his fingers across liam.

 

thinks that if he was a poet he would write sonnets and soliqueys and even goddamn haikus about liam and fill pages and notebooks with his messy scrawl, his love poured out into words, heart bleeding through ink and melting into the pages, sinking deep and staining them with the evidence of his tragic heart. 

 

thinks that if he was a singer he would write songs about warm eyes and dark hair and sing them quietly to himself in the shower, thinks that he would sing every loving lyric to liam across a stage, force his heart into his voice and his eyes until liam could see that everytime zayn sings "i'm in love with you"that he actually meant i'm in love with you, however pathetic it is.

 

but he is a singer, and every time he sings "i'm in love with you" he half wishes that liam would see but he doesn't, and zayn keeps singing and keeps half hoping.

 

zayn loves liam and bodies grow older.

 

maybe he doesn't hope hard enough, because liam never realises, but then zayn's never entirely sure if he wants him to know. because he doesn't think he could take the sad eyes and the "i'm sorry's" and the realisation but the continuance of forever being nothing but a friend.

 

he means no more to liam than the rest of the boys. 

 

zayn loves liam and the sky turns around the world.

 

he means no more than friendship to liam. 

 

zayn loves liam and summer fades into autumn.

 

it kills him but he can live with it. because most people aren’t lucky enough to find their soul mate, and so he'll hold it gently in the palm of his hands and cherish what he does have.

zayn loves liam.

because just because it can never be more doesn't mean it can't be enough.


End file.
